Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

EwanPalmer sends a followup to a story from last year about a team of Siberian scientists who recovered an ancient wooly mammoth carcass. It was originally believed to be about 10,000 years old, but subsequent tests showed the animal died over 43,000 years ago. The scientists have been surprised by how well preserved the soft tissues were. They say it's in better shape than a human body buried for six months. "The tissue cut clearly shows blood vessels with strong walls. Inside the vessels there is haemolysed blood, where for the first time we have found erythrocytes. Muscle and adipose tissues are well preserved." The mammoth's intestines contain vegetation from its last meal, and they have the liver as well. The scientists are optimistic that they'll be able to find high quality DNA from the mammoth, and perhaps even living cells. They now say there's a "high chance" that data would allow them to clone the mammoth.

No supervillain named 'Madam' would be pretty enough for today's comic readers. A 'Madam' doesn't have huge yet perky breasts or a tight bottom that she can bend to point at the reader while also looking the same way.

At most, we'd get something like 'Mammatha', or maybe a 'Mammoth Girl'.

I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?

I didn't mean literally the size of the animal. What I meant is that there is only going to be so much 43,000-year-old DNA to go around. You wouldn't want to waste it on a process that didn't work. You'd want to start out small, with a dead, frozen chicken that had been on ice for a year or so. Extract its DNA, and then see if you could get a live chicken out of it.

Making cloned mammals was highly inefficient (Dolly was the only lamb that survived to adulthood from 277 attempts - although by 2014 Chinese scientists were reported to have 70-80% success rates cloning pigs[21])

I suppose the idea of cloning a 43,000-year-old mammoth would be the kind of thing that would attract funding, but from a purely scientific standpoint, wouldn't you start out small and try to clone, say, a dead chicken first, just to see if the process actually worked?

It doesn't matter that the donor is dead. The process of cloning [wikipedia.org] involves taking out DNA and inserting it into another cell. All that matters is that enough DNA can be collected for a complete organism. Freezing is completely irrelevant as even human embryos used for in-vitro fertilization are routinely frozen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]They use additives to prevent formation of ice crystals, but the temperatures are certainly what you would call freezing, and the preserved objects (embryos, here) are solidified.

We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.

We have been able to clone several species already. That's not the problem. The problem is that you need a surrogate mother for the embryo and the closest we have is the African elephant, which separated from the mammoth a long time ago. From TFA it seems they are already working on cross-species clones but they are still a long way off.

That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible. The up side of a project like this is that if we can solve the problem do cloning a mammoth it we can start harvesting the DNA of many individuals of species like tigers and rhinos that are about to be become extinct thanks

That may seem like a victory but it's really just scratching the surface. Once you have cloned a mammoth what then? To establish a viable population you need genetic diversity, a minimum founder population of 50-100 individuals that should preferably be as distantly related as possible.

Keep cloning them from the same DNA sequence for zoos and such? Wildlife that's threatened by extinction because of us is fine, reintroducing wildlife that died out many thousands of years ago due to natural selection seems like an overall bad idea. Despite there being cave paintings of them, there's no place on current day earth where they belong in the natural environment. And even if we could set up such a preserve it'd have to be huge to function.

I have to admire the technology behind cloning, but to clone a dead chicken is one thing, but cloning some dead mammal would be a better example. Whether this be a rat or something of that nature, we need to consider what we are doing. How do we gestate that clone? Japan is working on technology to carry a human fetus to term, this should be adapted to larger creatures.

Yes, I know a seeded comment says that size is irrelevant, but I have to counter that point and say, "Size is very important."

Don't be so hard on him. He's been hanging around Slashdot so long that he's forgotten that 'sheep' is actually an animal, not a term of derision used to identify life forms only slightly smarter than a paramecium.

I don't know. These things were basically hunted to extinction. So they may be pretty delicious or it might just be that a Mammoth hunt was a comparatively easy way to get the whole tribe fed all at once, with left overs to store.

I don't know. These things were basically hunted to extinction. So they may be pretty delicious or it might just be that a Mammoth hunt was a comparatively easy way to get the whole tribe fed all at once, with left overs to store.

For people who lived on the prehistoric tundra, anything they could get was pretty delicious.

In other news, scientists have determined that the smaller-sized and shorter-lived (faster generations) organism known as the "chicken" has successfully adapted and thereby avoided excinction, by changing its flavor to something resembling elephants.

Off topic, but if you're into making stuff like I am... the only legal way to get ivory anymore (besides an insane permitting process) is tusks dug up from mammoths in the arctic. I suspect that if they start re-introducing them to the wild, that will become illegal to... which would be super lame. Also, the ivory found in bogs and such usually absorb minerals and stuff making it very unique looking.

Living cells - no way. Even if frozen for a few seconds cell die. That's what 'frostbite' is, then your fingers/toes/nose turn black and falloff... And saying it's better preserved than something buried for 6 months! Wow - things rot in my fridge in days.

Let me correlate your experience with this story: Likely dead before freezing, nope. Cells in culture - nope. Step down freezer - nope. Liquid nitrogen storage: nope. And unless you are a vampire or alien, your have not stored them for 43,000 years...

See cryopreservation [wikipedia.org] and suspended animation [wikipedia.org]. Not only is it possible - it's been done. It's not the temperature itself that kills cells, it's the effects of lowering the temperature that causes damage. If you can mitigate these effects (such as the formation of ice crystals), you can prevent cell death.

It is possible, and it has been done. But it takes a specialized organism (bacteria, maybe frogs, some insects) or some way to prevent ice crystal formation... And a mammoth dis not have this advantage. Your references require some quite advanced technology that was not around (that I know of) 43000 years ago. A nicely frozen steak is not viable tissue.

The fact that they have the liver and last meal are very promising. It seems likely that the flora of a mammoth's gut were different from those in a modern-day African elephant's. We are all super-organisms, you know, and an inoculation with a little of its own poop in infancy could set up the appropriate flora. The researchers can also figure out what exactly the mammoth liked to eat.

More problematic, I imagine, is mitochondria, etc. Cross-species cloning puts DNA from one beast into the cells (facto

First off, no one has ever cloned an actual living elephant. Horses have been cloned by implanting a cell nucleus from a living cell in a host egg cell and then implanting that in a surrogate mother. That process results in about 1 viable embryo for every 1,000 attempts so it is hardly a sure thing. In TFA however, they are talking about taking a nucleus from a 43,000-year-old frozen cell and implanting that in an egg cell of another species and then implanting the hoped for embryo into a living elephant

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.

This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

Not only does that seem rather pointless, but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.

This matter really feels one of those times when scientists should be reminding themselves that just because we *CAN* do something does not necessarily mean that we *SHOULD*.

Mammoths survived until at least 2500 years ago on Wrangel island where that particular population was probably wiped out by modern humans so at least the habitat question is a non issue.

While there appears to be broad agreement that Mammoths did exist on Wrangel as recently as 2000 BCE (4000 years ago), I cannot find any scholarly research to suggest that they co-existed with humans; or if they did, that they were hunted by those humans.

I was going to make a very similar comment to yours, but the more I thought about it the more the mammoth seems like a good test case.

It seems to me that we're just starting the testing & experimentation phase of resurrection technology. To be cautious I think we should start testing this new technology on extinct species that meet both of the following conditions:
(1) Are unlikely to escape captivity (ideally test species should be unable to survive outside specially designed enclosures).
(2) Are big, lumbering, and slow breeding. Even if such a species somehow escapes captivity (and manages to survive in the wild) we can still hunt them down and eliminate them.

So far as I know mammoths meet both of these conditions making them good test subjects for resurrection technology."... bringing [the mammoth] into an environment that it was not evolved to handle" - That's a feature, not a bug!

To be quite blunt: I'm just a layman and I'm really not interested in ever seeing revived mammoths released in to the wild.
I'm more interested in seeing mammoths used as safe scientific test subjects for experimenting with the technology to revive extinct species.

Once the process of reviving extinct species is understood well enough that it can be done safely: Species that I would like to see revived (and released into the wild) are ones that were recently driven to extinction by human activity (by over

but it also strikes me as arguably sounding like animal cruelty. I'd suggest that the scientific discoveries we might make by doing this may be heavily outweighed by the ethical considerations involved.

Your logic seems to be that it's unethical to bring them into a world that they can't survive in. But they all endured the waxing and waning of ice ages before that. The current thinking is that either humans or some sudden climate catastrophe caused the Holocene megafaunal extinctions, and not an inability to adapt to post ice age climate conditions. The only thing that seems to be preventing most of these species from thriving today is humans themselves.

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

I suspect that there is a significant difference between sustaining themselves in the wild in a climate they have trouble handling and being raised in essentially what will be a zoo which is where they are going.

If mammoths were wiped out by climate change, then resurrecting the species in a modern climate would be bringing it into an environment that it was not evolved to handle.

The modern climate has changed many times since they went extinct, and we don't even know that there weren't any places where they couldn't have survived back then - it could simply be that their populations got stuck too far away to migrate in time.

Depends on whether your definition of "evil" requires malicious intent or is just anything that turns out really badly for you. A natural supernova would be extremely unfortunate. Aliens causing the supernova to wipe out competition would be evil.

Who says natural selection should have the final word? Or perhaps the concept of "fitness for survival" should be expanded to include "cool enough that some other advanced species will want to resurrect it." Mammoths, saber-tooth cats, & T-Rex all fit this bill; the Prehistoric Instant Death Mosquito doesn't.

Mammoths don't travel at 500+ mph. Planes don't leave footprints or take great, big dumps on the ground to announce where they've been. Now, if they create a mammoth that can travel at 500 mph across water, I concede that yes, we may lose track of it.

AFAIK frozen mammoth meat HAS been eaten before by sled dogs, if not people.
One thing going for this is the close relatives still living for the surrogate mother. I guess the down side is daddy elephant is going to take one look at the baby and bith-slap mommy until she runs away to join the circus.

Seriously, it could be a form a preservation for species that are currently endangered, plus for something that was alive as recently as mammoths (2500 years ago), the Earth's climate in total hasn't changed that much (current warming trend notwithstanding) since when they roamed freely. So why not?

When you see those skeletons of extinct animals in the museums, does no part of you yearn to see a living, breathing, specimen, just to see it and how it behaves? Don't you want to know??

Well, do be fair to Dr. Malcolm, I think he was referring to the phenomenon of life in general, not particular lives. Thus the extinctions that wiped out 99% (or whatever) of all life forms still resulted in the flourishing of the other 1% (or whatever), resulting in the planet teeming with life. No matter the circumstances, something finds a way to thrive.